India Lenon is at Oxford University, combining her studies of Classics with all the other joys of student life. She blogs about current affairs and government policies affecting students and young people. India is @indialenon on Twitter.

The death of the gap year holiday

Finding themselves: as many as 100,000 British teenagers take a 'bridging year' before university (Photo: PHOTOLIBRARY)

“I believe the golden age of the gap year is over”, said the chief executive of UCAS (the body which controls university admissions) yesterday. Mary Curnock Cook explained that given the current state of cut-throat competition for too few university places, if students take a year out it should be a “bridging year”, used to “enhance their attractiveness to institutions”.

What Curnock Cook seems to be implying is partly true: that "finding oneself" in Africa does little to boost one’s CV, and if anything acts as an indication of wealth and weak interest in further education. Universities are often unwilling to accept a sixth former who is applying to come in two years’ time in case someone better comes along the following year, and there is the added disincentive that a whole year out can mean that students need time at the start of a course to refresh their previous knowledge.

However, she is wrong to imply that until they are renamed “bridging years” students will always use gap years for a “nice break”. Although I did not take one myself, my school made us aware that anyone who did would have to justify what they were doing to the universities to which they applied. This meant that the great majority who took a year out spent much of it doing something directly relevant to their chosen degree course. Nice maybe, but hardly a break.

Most significantly, every single person I know who took a gap year spent the first three to six months undertaking paid employment to fund their travels. There is a widespread assumption that gap years are usually paid for by mummy and daddy, but this is a misconception, and one that Curcock Cook appears to be labouring under. Jobs taken by friends of mine range from waiting tables to internships at investment banks, but they all ensured that those who took gap years were considerably more employable and better aware of the working world than those of us who had come straight from school.

Curnock Cook insults the intelligence of university applicants with her proposed “radical change”. Students are perfectly aware of how difficult it is to get into university, and those foolish enough to see a gap year as an excuse for an extended holiday won’t have their minds changed by rebranding.